Mona:

As an American, I would defend with my life the right of the religious to construct a house of worship, wherever they wish. And, as a veteran, I have put my life on the line for that, and other, American principles.

None the less, I find the construction of this Mosque, in this place, troubling and provocative. And, it is that same amendment that protects my right to say so.

Were Serbs to propose the construction of a Serbian Orthodox church, overlooking the killing fields of Srebrenica, even though this is a constitutionally protected right in Bosnia-Herzegovina, would you not find it offensive? I must say I would. As would many (if not most) Bosniak Muslims. And you? No?

And, were some number of Bosniak Muslims to avail themselves of their constitutionally protected right to free speech, and express their dismay at such a prospect, would you call them bigots as well?

One of your greatest fans,
Erik

Hello Mona,

I’ve been waiting for you to weigh in on this subject. I admit to having mixed feelings about this ultra-mediated mosque being built near “ground zero” in New York. In general I pay mosques no more attention than I do Catholic churches or Jewish synagogues… they are places I seldom have occasion to visit and therefore are not in my sphere of influence one way or the other.

This particular mosque would likely fall into the same category of places I am unlikely to visit. That said, I DO have a problem with someone from another culture thumbing his nose at America and using his religion and political correctness to facilitate it. I think that this is what has people riled up, not the mosque itself, but the fact that someone is opening it just to irritate us.

Now then, Newt Gingrich a bigot? Huh?! Don’t think so. More evidence to support my contention that President Obama is a socialist. My own views on things like race relations might cause some to class me as a bigot… so go ahead and call me one… but a bigot would not have gotten very far in modern American politics. Mr. Gingrich is no bigot.

An old NCO… who is incidentally Black… once told me that “Opinions is like (the South side of a North bound human being)… ev’rybody got one!”… SGT Robert Gray. America is the once place on Earth where just about any opinion can be expressed openly and without fear of official reprisal. Ain’t America Great?

An excellent post! Thank you for sharing this aspect of you life history, journey, and pilgrimage. I trust New Yorkers to be liberal and open to all. Mayor Bloomberg is standing firm, which is good too. All the best!

Sorry, for my website you have to put in the www ie http://www.chezchiara.com, otherwise it leads to Go Daddy!

Mona,
You are a great writer. I share with you your liberal views on Islam. This is the first time I read your articles. I promise you to follow the future articles wherever they will be published. Keep up the good work.
On the NYC mosque, the Moslems should follow Qandil’s example in the Seattle incident. They shoud be forgiving and resort to reconciliation. The mosque could be built at any other location.
Mohamed Youssef

I enjoyed and was moved by your article. As a Jewish native New Yorker who lost a former student and a former co-worker on 9/11, I have no problem whatsoever with the Park51 project. I don’t understand the argument made by some other posters here who seem to distinguish between Islam and America. There are American-born Muslims in profusion in this country — how is their religion distinguishable from what is American? This country has no official religion or faith, and that’s one of the glorious things about America.

I cherish the idea of forgiveness and reconciliation, but I am deeply troubled by the idea that people who have nothing to forgive and nothing they need to reconcile should be advised to forgive and, in the process, to give up their rights to their own property and build “somewhere else.”

“I don’t understand the argument made by some other posters here who seem to distinguish between Islam and America.”

And, as no one has, that is a straw man.

I wonder if some would be dismayed at the construction of a Shinto shrine overlooking the USS Arizona memorial?

Or, perhaps, were a Marxist community center and rest home for ex-Soviet Secret Service personnel, complete with atheist shrine, was to be constructed overlooking the Katyn forest?

Or, maybe a Lutheran church next to Auschwitz?

How about the Mormans constructing a Tabernacle at the site of the Mountain Meadow massacre?

Of course, this list could go on and on.

Perhaps all these would be constitutionally protected. But, would not those proposing them understand how provocative and insensitive to some they might be? Would all those who found any of them be simple bigots?

Erik:

Interesting gedankenexperiment, it isn’t one I’ve heard before. So I did some research, as I usually do when encountering pithy arguments. I learned some things that I didn’t know before, although I’m sure my understanding is far from perfect. Here are the highlights:

1) There really is no significant population of, well, anyone in the areas that were used as killing fields near Srebrenica. The killers deliberately chose isolated areas for their executions.

2) There is an orthodox church quite near the mosque in Srebrenica proper you can see the minaret and most of the church in this photo:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Srebrenica_landscape.JPG It seems both are well attended and neither are considered an insult to the other.

3) In Srebrenica religious tribal ties run deep. Unlike much of America, being a member of a specific ethnic group means being a member of a specific religion and vice versa. So while it is technically true that orthodox christians killed many muslims it isn’t particularly meaningful – it is more meaningful to say that serbs killed many bosniaks.

4) The legal basis for freedom of religion in the country is fairly new, after all the country is new too. Thus the serbian orthodox church is still effectively the state church and children in public school are provided religious instruction in its teachings, similar instruction is available for catholics but apparently not for muslims.

So what do I think after learning these things?

Well, first off the comparison isn’t nearly as apt as your phraseology suggested. Downtown Manhattan has many muslims who call it home – the one mosque in the area has a room capacity of about 45 people but frequently overflows hundreds of worshipers onto the sidewalk during friday prayers. Thus there is a legitimate community need for a mosque in the area whereas the idea of a church sitting out in the middle of the boonies utterly deserted except perhaps on a handful of holidays is kinda silly. (Interesting fact I picked up along the way, of the victims in the WTC attack with a publicly known religion, the percentage who were muslim is roughly 3x higher than the general population of the USA. So muslims certainly aren’t new to the area.)

Second, muslims around the world aren’t a homogeneous ethnic group (they aren’t even a homogeneous religious group what with sunni, sufi, shia, salafi, deobandi, barelwi, jamaat al-muslimeen, ibadi, alawi, alevi, zaidiyyah and twelver, just for starters). In Srebrenica it is a lot more cut and dry, divide it by religion you get three groups for 95% of the population, divide it by ethnicity you get the same three groups. So it is a lot easier to conflate religion with other tribal tendencies.

I can see how one group might take offense to another group expanding their territory – be it with another church or buying up a lot of land with foreign money or building a new school or by force as was the case with the massacre. But that opposition is based on the tribal conflict there, not necessarily one of religion. If the church builders’ motives were religious and not tribal then I would not see it as offensive.

And that’s where I think most of the opposition to the park51 mosque comes from – tribalism. There is a perception of islam as monolithic, so much so that it is common to hear unknowlegdable people claim that muslim loyalties are to their own fictious “nation” regardless of legal citizenship (not unlike those who said JFK would just be a puppet of the pope.) It has been said, on national news, that the mosque would be a “terrorist command center” and that Rauf is an “extremist imam.” Which is laughable considering that he is a sufi, probably the most chill of all the islamic theologies — he was asked to speak at the funeral for Daniel Pearl where he said “I am a Jew, I have always been one” and “not only am I a Christian, but I have always been one.” If someone building this hypothetical serbian orthodox church were to say something like that, I’d say it would be really difficult to impugn his motives or his church because such an attitude is intrinsically anti-tribal and thus completely American.

Erik:

Of all your examples, the only one that’s particularly analogous is that of Pearl Harbor and even there you conflate a religion (shinto) with a nation (japan) that we were literally at war with – there are almost as many buddhist japanese as there are shinto japanese. A common problem with all your other examples, including the “killing fields of srebrenica” is that no one lives in those places. The death camps at Auschwitz are not in the town itself (and yes there are various protestant churches in the town of Auschwitz today), there is no settlement in the Mountain Meadows area of Utah and the Katyn massacre was in an area outside of town that is essentially uninhabited. But just like the WTC ground-zero, Pearl Harbor is part of a major residential and commercial area.

It should come as no surprise that just as there are muslims living in lower Manhattan so too are there japanese living near (and working at) Pearl Harbor. And therefore shinto ceremonies are semi-regularly conducted at the Pearl Harbor Memorial Chapel itself. Additionally, there is a shinto shrine a couple of miles down the road. Furthermore, the Hongwanji (japanese buddhist) temple is just a couple of thousand feet from the USS Arizona Memorial and up the mountain so it literally does overlook Pearl Harbor is the Rissho Kosei Kai Buddhist Center which is another japanese variant of buddhism.

And all of that is completely uncontroversial and has been so for decades, I know this to be true because I grew up in Hawaii myself.

Now, as you said – your list could go on and on. You could keep dredging up more and more outlandish analogies that are further and further from the mark – you gotta admit that stretch about a retirement home for ex-NKVD in the Katyn forest was like something out of a Mel Brooks movie. But I think doing so would only emphasize what’s missing from your point of view — an acknowledgment that muslims are part of the community living around ground-zero and therefore have not just the constitutional right (which I give you credit for acknowledging) but a legitimate expectation to go about their lives like they would in any other American community.

And, of course, no analogies are perfect. The religious structures of which you speak were there long before hand. As were the some two hundred mosques in New York. Nobody is suggesting that they are taking offense at them. Well, at least not myself. This is a new structure, to be constructed on a sight which was literally showered with aircraft parts and human remains on 9-11. I merely find the lack of consideration for the feelings of those who’s loved ones died here to be troubling. And, there are others that find it downright offensive.

If, it is an attempt to reach out and promote understanding, as the promoters claim, I believe it is failing miserably. Perhaps a re-think would be appropriate.

I’m pretty sure that the Pearl Harbor Memorial Chapel post dates the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Rissho Kosei Kai Buddhist Center in Pearl City was built in 1972. But all that really is irrelevant – to say that building a new house of worship is troubling is tantamount to saying that it is troubling for new worshipers to move into the neighborhood.

After all, the reason that planning for the Park51 mosque started is because the next nearest mosque, with space for just 45 people, now overflows hundreds onto the sidewalk every week. From the August 14th statement on the park51.org website: “We hope, through Park51, to accommodate the long-standing needs of the Muslims of lower Manhattan, and also contribute to the revitalization of these neighborhoods.”

“…to say that building a new house of worship is troubling is tantamount to saying that it is troubling for new worshipers to move into the neighborhood.

So says you, not me. As such, another straw man.

I’m an atheist. I still find a Florida preacher’s plans to burn a pile of Korans troubling, and I assure you some find it offensive. His perfect right, though. Provided he gets a burn permit.

There are many forms of expression protected by the First Amendment, whether constructing a house of worship, or torching a pile of religious tomes, that can have an impact beyond their stated intentions.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, himself, knows this to be true. In a recent interview he stated “…had I known [the controversy] would happen we certainly would never have done this…” and “…we would not have done something that would create more divisiveness.” But, he is now claiming that if the location is changed (which he also said he is willing to consider) it would “…strengthen Islamist radicals’ ability to recruit followers and will likely increase violence against Americans.” So, once again, Americans are to blame for their own murders.

It appears that the Imam did not well consider the possible consequences of his original plan, but is now considering those of changing the location.

Perhaps a bit disingenuous?